One Art

. . . There is no doubt that the crisis behind this poem was the apparent loss to Bishop of Alice Methfessel, the companion, caretaker, secretary, and great love of the last eight years of her life. Although its method is the description of the accumulation of losses in the poet's life, its occasion is the loss of Alice.

"One Art" is an exercise in the art of losing, a rehearsal of the things we tell ourselves in order to keep going, a apeech in a brave voice that cracks once in the final version and cracked even more in the early drafts. The finished poem may be the best modern example of a villanelle and shares with its nearest competitor, Theodore Roethke's justly famous "The Waking"—"I wake to sleep and take my waking slow"—the feeling that in the course of writing or saying the poem the poet is giving herself a lesson, in waking, in losing. Bishop's lines share her ironic tips for learning to lose and to live with loss.

[Millier quotes the poem]

More than once in the drafts of Bishop's published poems, one finds that she came to express in the final draft nearly the opposite of what she started out to say. As Barbara Page (1981-82) has pointed out, for example, in the seven available drafts of her poem "Questions of Travel," Bishop develops the key line of the final stanza from an early "The choice perhaps is not great . . . but fairly free" (box 31, folder 436, VC) to its final "The choice is never wide and never free," as the poet comes to realize restrictions that bind the traveler by articulating them in the poem (CP, pp. 55-57). The very late poem "Santarém," which describes from an eighteen-year distance a stop on Bishop's 1960 trip down the Amazon River, offers a similar development. In the final version of that poem, Bishop describes the confluence of "two great rivers," the Tapajos and the Amazon, and remembers that she was enchanted by this coming together. The last lines of the central stanza read in the final draft:

Even if one were tempted
to literary interpretations
such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female
--such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off
in that watery, dazzling dialectic.
(CP, p. 185)

The earliest drafts of this poem (box 31, folder 470, VC) show that Bishop was at first concerned, in trying to articulate the emotion she felt in seeing the conflux of two great rivers, with choosing between them, between the literary interpretations she dismisses in the final version. The poem originally evaluated, as "Questions of Travel" had, the traveler's possibility for "choice"; the resolution the conflux first offered was the chance to decide: "Choice—a choice! That evening one might choose," she wrote in the first draft. In the final draft, even the idea of choice has disappeared and the place offers only resolution, as the poet lets go of her need to choose.

Something similar occurs within the seventeen available drafts of "One Art" (box 30, folder 456, VC). Bishop conceived the poem as a villanelle from the start, and the play of "twos" within it—two rivers, two cities, the lost lover means not being "two" any more—suggests that the two-rhyme villanelle is a form appropriate to the content. Bishop told an interviewer that after years of trying to write in that form, the poem just came to her. "I couldn't believe it—it was like writing a letter" (Spires 1981, p. 64). A letter with seventeen drafts, perhaps. The poem does seem to have been written over a period of about two weeks—ending on 4 November 1975—much shorter than her usual period of composition.

The first extant draft is a series of partly worked-up notes, apparently a basis for developing the rhymes and refrains of the final version. Its overall thematic shape is familiar in the final poem, with the evidence of the speaker's experience at losing followed by a somewhat strained application of that experience. In its unedited catalog of losses, it is heartbreaking to read.

The draft is tentatively titled "HOW TO LOSE THINGS," then "THE GIFT OF LOSING THINGS" and finally, "THE ART OF LOSING THINGS." (The title "One Art" appears to have been arrived at very late in the process.) This draft begins with the suggestion that the way to acquire this art is to "begin by mislaying" several items that remain in the final draft—keys, pens, glasses. Then she says,

--This is by way of introduction. I really
want to introduce myself—I am such a
fantastic lly good at losing things
I think everyone shd. profit from my experiences.

She then lists her qualifications: "You may find it hard to believe, but I have actually lost / I mean lost, and forever, two whole houses." Among her other losses: "A third house, . . . / I think, 'mislaid' . . . / . . . I won't know for sure for some time,"

one peninsula and one island. . . .
a small-sized town . . . and many smaller bits of geography or scenery
a splendid beach, and a good-sized bay. . . .

a good piece of one continent
and another continent—the whole damned thing!

In the end, she writes:

One might think this would have prepared me
for losing one average-sized—not especially exceptionally
beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person
(except for blue eyes) (only the eyes were exceptionally
beautiful and the hands looked
intelligent) the fine hands
But it doesn't seem to have, at all. . .

The draft trails off with "He who loseth his life, etc.—but he who / loses his love—neever, no never never never again—."

In Elizabeth's handwriting in the margins of this typed draft are notations about possible rhymes for the villanelle, including "ever/never/forever," "geography/scenery," and a version of her final choice, involving "intelligent" "continent," "sent," "spent," and "lent." This catalog served to set the terms for working into the form. By the second draft, the poem is an incomplete villanelle with "The art of losing isn't hard to master" as the first line, and the "no disaster" play in the third line. The final stanza is crossed out, although legible under the scoring is "But your loss spelt disaster." The marginalia, handwritten like the draft, consist of more work on rhyme and suggest other directions in which Bishop might have taken the poem. One set—"gesture," "protester," "attestor," "foster," "boaster"—suggests a possible angry, almost litigious response to loss, and the words evident and false are set to one side of the scribbled-over final stanza, ready to be worked in.

The following drafts work mostly on the first four stanzas, whittling the catalog of losses into a discreet and resonant form and setting the rhyme scheme firmly. It is not until the fifth draft, which consists othe wise of a simple list of end-rhymes, that Bishop once again breaks her controlled tone in the final stanza. Here the original refrain is dutifully repeated, but the poetic frame, for a moment, won't bear the emotional weight:

The art of losing's not so hard to master
But won’t help in think of that disaster
No—I am lying—

This transformation of the "false"/"evident" play into "lying" is Bishop's first major change aimed at solving to her logical, emotional, and aesthetic satisfaction the problem of how the experience of losing car keys, houses, and continents could apply in handling this truly, as she perceived it now, disastrous loss. In the sixth draft, the final stanza reads: "The art of losing's not so hard to master / until that point & then it / fails & is disaster—." The poem bogs down here; the seventh draft stops short of the final stanza, and the eighth is sketchy, with such lines as "losses nobody can master" and "the art of losing's not impossible to master / It won't work . . ."—most of which are crossed out.

It appears that some time passed between the eighth and ninth drafts, for all of the later attempts are typed and contain completed versions of all six stanzas. In the ninth draft Bishop develops in the last stanza a more complete version of the "lying" theme:

All that I write is false, it's evident
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
oh no.
anythng at all anything but one's love. (Say it: disaster.)

The formalized spontaneity of "(Say it: disaster.)" enables the poem to accommodate the overflow of emotion that had, to this point, disarrayed the final stanza and made the villanelle's ritual repetitions inadequate to manage the emotional content. Bishop was fond of this technique of self-interruption or self-revision in a poem. She learned it from Gerard Manley Hopkins and from Baroque sermon writers and spoke of it as "portraying the mind in action" ("The Baroque Style in Prose," box 27, folder 395, VC).

The next version of the final stanza begins with the first real exploration of possible code words that might stand for "you," a phrase or aspect that would bring the lover wholly into the poem. The line is: "But, losing you (eyes of the Azure Aster)"—recalling the "remarkable" blue eyes of the first draft. This awkward and self-consciously poetic phrase would hang in through several drafts, until both its awkwardness and Bishop's need to generalize caused her to discard it for the more discreet and more melodious "gesture," which had been haunting the edges of the final stanza in the previous few drafts. Here, in the tenth, the idea is still that "I've written lies above" (which she has crossed out in pencil, with "above's all lies" written in) and "the art of losing isn't hard to master / with one exception. (Say it.) That's disaster." In draft eleven, the final stanza is reworked five times and the last line becomes, as Bishop had written and crossed out in the previous draft, "with one exception. (Write it.) Write 'disaster.'" Here both words in the phrase write it are italicized, as they would be until the poem was collected in Geography III—a slight but significant alteration of tone. The change in her means of affirmation or validation from "say it" to "write it" is the crux that, once solved, let the poem speak its curiously independent truth.

For midway through the twelfth draft, quite abruptly, "above's all lies" becomes "above's not lies" and then "I haven't lied above." And yet, still, "The art of losing wasn't hard to master / with this exception (Write it!) this disaster." This draft reworks the last stanza four tortured times and clearly wavers on whether or not "above's all lies," and on whether this loss is an example or an exception. Versions of both feelings are tried and crossed out and even the parenthetical outburst, "write it," alternates with "oh isn't it?" a disaster. What remains is the idea that whatever the brave speech or the possibilities for mastery, this loss still looks like disaster.

The thirteenth draft is the last that thoroughly reworks the final stanza, and it is at this point that the "gesture" becomes a "special voice," then a "funny voice," and finally the "joking voice." There are two tentative versions of the ending. First:

And losing you now (a special voice, a gesture)
Doesn’t mean I’ve lied. It’s evident
the loss of love is possible to master,
even if this looks like (Write it!) like disaster.

And, mostly crossed out,

In losing you I haven't lied above. It's evident
. . .
The loss of love is something one must master
even if it looks like (Write it!) like disaster.

Firmly in place is the idea that this apparent disaster does not mean that losing cannot after all be mastered, even though when Bishop sat down to write the poem the first time, it must have seemed that it did.. In the fourteenth draft, the words "not too hard to master" indicate Bishop's approach to the final version—the colloquial tone is a trademark of her polished style. The fifteenth draft makes few changes in the poem—notably in line two "So many things seem really to be meant" to be lost becomes "so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost." The draft is typed and has an almost-finished version of the final stanza—though handwritten notes show Bishop still struggling with how to express the "above's not lies" idea—"these were not lies" is the typed version; the handwritten notes offer "I still do can't lie" and "I still won't lie." The draft that Frank Bidart has seems to be a cleanly typed carbon version of draft fifteen with changes dictated to Bidart over the telephone by Bishop. The two major changes are the "filled with the intent to be lost" change, and, as is not in the version labeled draft fifteen at Vassar, in the second line of the final stanza, "these were not lies" becomes the now seemingly inevitable "I shan't have lied." What is odd about this late change is that "I shan't have lied" is technically in the future perfect tense. The phrase retains the past-tense sense of "I haven't lied above"— referring to the list of mastered losses in the rest of the poem—yet also poses a possible resolution in the future: "after I come to terms with this loss, then I won't have lied, but right now I don't know." The most significant ramification of the change to "I shan't have lied" is that it reminds us forcefully that this poem is a crisis lyric in the truest sense—"Even losing you" comes to mean "Even if I lose you"—and we know that this is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but a live, as it were, moment of awful fear, with relief only a hoped-for possibility.

One way to read Bishop's modulation from "the loss of you is impossible to master" to something like "I may yet master this loss even though it looks like disaster" is that in the writing of such a disciplined, demanding poem ["(Write it!)"] lies a piece of the mastery of the loss. Working through each of her losses—from the bold, painful catalog of the first draft to the finely honed and privately meaningful final version—is a way to overcome them or, if not to overcome them, then to see the way in which one might possibly master oneself in the face of loss. It is all, perhaps, "one art"—elegy-writing, mastering loss, mastering grief, self-mastery. The losses in the poem are real: time, in the form of the "hour badly spent" and, more tellingly for the orphaned Elizabeth, "my mother's watch"; the lost houses, in Key West, Petrópolis and, the one still in doubt, Ouro Prêto, Brazil. The city of Rio de Janeiro and the whole South American continent were lost to her with Lota's suicide. And currently, in the fall of 1975, she thought she had lost her dearest friend and lover, she of the blue eyes and fine hands. Yet each version of the poem distanced the pain a little more, depersonalized it, moved it away from the tawdry self-pity and confession that Bishop disliked in many of her contemporaries. The effect of reading all these drafts together one often feels in reading the raw material of her poems and then the poems themselves: the tremendous selectivity of her method and her gift for forcing richness from minimal words. An example is how, in the first draft of "One Art," the lines "I am such a / fantastic lly good at losing things / I think everyone shd. profit from my experiences" introduce her list of qualifications. In the final version the two words "And look!" serve the same purpose.

Elizabeth's letters to her doctor, a brilliant woman then in her seventies, describe the despair of the fall of 1975. Elizabeth was sure that she had lost the last person on earth who loved her. The letters agonize over her prospect of a lonely old age, crowded with fans and students and hangers-on but empty of love. Out of this despair, apparently, came the villanelle "One Art." But my reading of the poem still wants to make it Bishop's elegy for her whole life, despite its obvious origins. Elizabeth apologized to her friends for the poem, saying "I'm afraid it's a sort of tear-jerker" (December 1975, PU)—she was clearly somewhat uncomfortable with even this careful approach to the confessional. It is well known that her friends remained for a long time protective of her personal reputation and unwilling to have her grouped among lesbian poets or even among the other great poets of her generation—Robert Lowell, Roethke, and John Berryman—as they self-destructed before their readers' eyes. Elizabeth herself taught them this reticence by keeping her private life very private indeed and by investing what confession there was in her poems deeply in objects and places, thus deflecting biographical inquiry. In the development of this poem, discretion is a poetic method and a part of a process of self-understanding, the seeing of a pattern in one's own life.

The poem arose from an immediate crisis, but Bishop's papers and correspondence reveal that its elements had been with her for a long time. Her letters to Frani Blough Muser reveal that the two teenaged, then college-aged, girls had a kind of running joke about losing things—a letter of 5 September 1929 (VC) includes the following lines, apparently written by the eighteen-year-old Bishop, parodying Longfellow:

Lives of great men will remind us
We can mold life as we choose,
And departing leave behind us
Towels, safety pins and shoes.

A couple of years later, as Elizabeth contemplated a walking tour of Newfoundland, she had hopes of visiting the remote village of St. Anthony, "for after all, isn't St. Anthony the patron of lost articles?" (letter to Muser, 8 July 1932, VC). As it turned out, they couldn't get there; the village was "practically inaccessible." To Ilse and Kit Barker, Bishop wrote, referring to letters missing in the Brazilian mails, "I have a feeling some things have been lost in both directions—but now probably we'll never get it straightened out until all things are straightened out in eternity—at least that might be one way of filling up eternity, finding lost and mislaid articles" (6 October 1960, PU). More humorously, after the poem was published, Elizabeth temporarily lost her writing case in a Boston taxicab. To the Barkers she wrote, "Oh why did I ever write that cursed villanelle?" (28 August 1976, PU).

The joking voice, which people who knew both women tell me evokes its owner as surely as blue eyes would have done, is as well something that recurs in Elizabeth's life, that she loved in nearly all her friends and lovers, all the people whose loss had schooled her in the art of losing, and whose losses are implied in the catalog of "things" in the poem. A letter written to Anne Stevenson predicts the poem: "I have been very lucky in having had, most of my life, some witty friends,--and I mean real wit, quickness, wild fancies, remarks that make one cry with laughing. . . . The aunt I liked best was a very funny woman: most of my close friends have been funny people; Lota de Macedo Soares is funny. Pauline Hemingway (the 2nd Mrs. H.) a good friend until her death in 1951 was the wittiest person, man or woman, I've ever known. Marianne [Moore ] was very funny—[e.e.] Cummings, too, of course. Perhaps I need such people to cheer me up" (8 January 1964, WU).

The "joking voice," the gesture Elizabeth loved (and, in fact, employed), she loved in Alice, she had loved in Lota, she loved in these other friends dead and gone—the phrase brings them all into the poem. In Bishop's distillation of immediate crisis into enduring art, the lesson in losing becomes even more a lesson one learns over and over, throughout one's life. The tentative resolution offered in the poem was not, alas, a real one; Elizabeth struggled terribly with this loss for months afterward. Only the lost one's return solved it. The poem is a wish for resolution or a resolution in the sense of a determination to survive—"I will master this loss; I will."1 It is also a means of assessing the true magnitude of the present disaster in the middle of the crisis, a kind of "How bad is it?" question. And it explores the means of having one's loss and mastering it, too, which is the privilege of the elegist.

Notes

With exceptions as noted, all Elizabeth Bishop manuscripts quoted in this essay are among her papers at the Vassar College Library and are reproduced exactly as she left them. The collection holds seventeen drafts of "One Art," which Vassar has numbered.

1. The Oxford English Dictionary devotes several closely printed pages to the distinction between will and shall and reports, significantly, that "In the first person, shall has, from the early ME period, been the normal auxiliary for expressing mere futurity, without any adventitious notion a) of events conceived as independent of the speaker's volition. b) of voluntary action or its intended result. Further, I shall often expresses a determination in spite of opposition, and I shall not (colloq. I shan't) a peremptory refusal" (p. 152).

"One Art" is Bishop's one example of a villanelle, a form she admired and tried to work with for years. It is widely considered a splendid achievement of the villanelle. . . . Loss is its subject, but the poem begins almost trivially. The first line, casual and disarming, returns throughout the poem. The natural-sounding contraction helps to create the semblance of real speech even within this complex form, and the details and examples that follow immediately do not, indeed, seem like great losses. Door keys, a wasted hour, even forgotten names certainly do not warrant the term consistently invoked by the rhyme: "disaster." But the poem builds, until "cities" and "realms" -- of great import to this geographically inclined poet implied by this and all her books -- have been lost.

Not until the final quatrain, bringing the villanelle to the completion of its required form, does the real occasion of the poem appear. Here the loss is very personal, a person, "you." Yet the details and attributes here too are muted. Only parenthetically does Bishop reveal the importance of the you: "(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)," yet love is evident through the speaker's difficulty in revealing herself. There is a slight change, too, in the refrain line: "the art of losing's not too hard to master," qualifying that original assertion that loss "isn't hard to master." And in the final line the speaker must even exhort herself to complete the rhyme – (Write it!) -- since disaster looms very large indeed. Yes, says the poem, this is a great loss, which I am still working to master. After the suicide of Macedo Soares, Bishop returned to the United States, and so the loss of lands and love compound one another. At least in part, "One Art" is a deeply felt elegy, but Bishop uses both a strict and difficult form and a casual, conversational tone to hush the emotional intensity. In this fine poem, her attempt to mute serves also to heighten the poignancy.

Bishop's late poem, "One Art' (whose title conveys the implicit suggestion that mastery sought over loss in love is closely related to poetic control), articulates the tension between discipline in life and the force of circumstance.

The poem speaks in the tones of the survivor:

the art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

The opening fine, with its echo of a folk prescription such as "an apple a day," leads into the specifics of daily loss—of keys, of time—syntactic parallelism suggesting an evaluative equation of what we immediately recognize as hardly equal realities. Such parallelism, by providing a temporary distraction that draws the reader away from the force building in the poem, functions as a disarming form of humor that undercuts the potential self-pity otherwise latent in the poem's subject.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

"One Art" presents a series of losses as if to reassure both its author and its reader that control is possible—ironic gesture that forces upon us the tallying of experience cast in the guise of reassurance. By embracing loss as Emerson had Fate (the Beautiful Necessity), Bishop casts the illusion of authority over the inexorable series of losses she seeks to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

The race continues between "disaster" and "master" as the losses include her mother's watch, houses, cities, two rivers, a continent, and, perhaps, in the future, an intimate friend whom, breaking out of the pattern of inanimate objects, the poem directly addresses:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It’s evident
The art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Here conflict explodes as the verbal deviations from previously established word patterns reflect the price of the speaker's remaining true to her initial claim that experience of loss can yield to mastery. With a directness that comes to predominate in Bishop's later work, "One Art" delineates the relationship between the will and the world. Note the split of "a gesture / I love" across two lines; the profession stands by itself as it turns back toward the beloved gesture. Syntax reveals the pain "One Art" has been fighting, since its beginnings, to suppress as the thought of losing "you" awakens an anxiety the poem must wrestle with down to its close. This last time, the refrain varies its form, assuming an evidentiary structure that challenges as it expresses what has hitherto been taken as a fact recognized from within the poet's consciousness. Coupled with the addition of "it's evident" is the adverbial "too" (It’s evident / the art of losing's not too hard to master"), which increases the growing tension within the desire to repeat the poem's refrain while admitting growing doubts as to its accuracy. In the end, the pressure to recapitulate the by-now-threatened refrain betrays itself in the sudden interruption of the closing line by an italicized hand that enforces the completion of the "master" / "disaster" couplet that the poem itself has made, through its formal demands, an inevitable resolution: "the art of losing's not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster." The repetition of "like" postpones, ever so fleetingly, the final word that hurts all the more. The inevitability of "disaster" ironically recalls the fatalism of such childhood rituals as "he loves me; he loves me not" - in which the child's first words, "he loves me," and the number of petals on the flower determine the game's outcome. In its earlier evocation of folk ritual and in the villanelle's rhyme scheme, "One Art" reveals an ironic playfulness that works in collusion with high seriousness, a strategy that proliferates throughout Bishop's work.

"One Art" not only effects such poetic reversals but exposes them as affected. Bishop's choice of a villanelle, a traditional form of repetition that promises to make "art" out of "losing," seems to support the opening assertion, but the negatives cast doubt on the project at the outset:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Yet the title tells us that the art of writing and the art of losing are one, and the requirements of the form serve to render loss certain from the start. The third line already gives us the last word of the poem-the word she means to deny but is fated to write:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Writing and losing are one art because the formal repetition of loss, which promises mastery, simultaneously finalizes disaster: "(Write it!) like disaster." Repetition duplicates and divides, both masters and loses, and thus makes for "disaster." The division-by-duplication of the "aster" is the ill star that governs poets.

"One Art" is Bishop's one example of a villanelle, a form she admired and tried to work with for years. It is widely considered a splendid achievement of the villanelle. . . . Loss is its subject, but the poem begins almost trivially. The first line, casual and disarming, returns throughout the poem. The natural-sounding contraction helps to create the semblance of real speech even within this complex form, and the details and examples that follow immediately do not, indeed, seem like great losses. Door keys, a wasted hour, even forgotten names certainly do not warrant the term consistently invoked by the rhyme: "disaster." But the poem builds, until "cities" and "realms" -- of great import to this geographically inclined poet implied by this and all her books -- have been lost.

Not until the final quatrain, bringing the villanelle to the completion of its required form, does the real occasion of the poem appear. Here the loss is very personal, a person, "you." Yet the details and attributes here too are muted. Only parenthetically does Bishop reveal the importance of the you: "(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)," yet love is evident through the speaker's difficulty in revealing herself. There is a slight change, too, in the refrain line: "the art of losing's not too hard to master," qualifying that original assertion that loss "isn't hard to master." And in the final line the speaker must even exhort herself to complete the rhyme – (Write it!) -- since disaster looms very large indeed. Yes, says the poem, this is a great loss, which I am still working to master. After the suicide of Macedo Soares, Bishop returned to the United States, and so the loss of lands and love compound one another. At least in part, "One Art" is a deeply felt elegy, but Bishop uses both a strict and difficult form and a casual, conversational tone to hush the emotional intensity. In this fine poem, her attempt to mute serves also to heighten the poignancy.

The simple sentence of the opening stanza seems to subvert the title, declaring that this poem is not about art; rather, it is concerned with an acquired skill, the "art of losing." Critics anxious to commiserate with poets will find this reading psychologically appealing. Not only does it guarantee numerous opportunities to rehearse this art, but (Bishop suggests through the acceleration of enjambment) supplies materials branded "with the intent / to be lost." This perishable quality simultaneously allows for repeated practice and diminishment, if not extinction, of the pain. The poet offers a primer for the mastery of disaster, couched in the Puritan form of the sermon to others for their moral improvement.

Mindful always of the common auditor, Bishop forces the second stanza to visualize with the philosophical ruminations of the first. Readers learn precisely how to master this art, and are urged to practice, to make it into a virtuous habit: "Lose something every day." A further injunction counsels the reception and approval of that resulting disorder—the "fluster"—produced by haste, undue agitation. Loss, art, master, disaster—the lofty conceptual diction of the first stanza crumbles in the mockery of this near rhyme. The "lost door keys, the hour badly spent" become concrete entities and lost time. The refrain vulgarly collides with "fluster"—to master fluster?—in an uneasy rhyme casting the very tone of the poem into doubt.

Bishop enforces a progressively dynamic, almost uncontrollable, schedule of loss in the third stanza.Then simply shifts the focus to the next lesson. No longer does the homilist tally manageable, sympathetic incidents; the poem has moved beyond them to over- whelming concerns: places, names, and destinations. Each reader must supply concrete examples. The "intent" of the first stanza blossoms into the broader intentions of "where it was you meant / to travel" of the third stanza. Bishop continues to induce specific details from the reader as the pace and range grow. Soon drained of places, names, and travel plans, the reader must struggle to fill the lists. The muted refrain rings hollow as these clustered categories of loss and faster/disaster cacophonize.

After the impersonal professorial tone, the abrupt introduction of the lyric I requires immediate reappraisal of all that comes before this stanza. The homilist's experiential knowledge, suppressed in the first half of the poem, surfaces as the teacher has obviously experienced frustration in the auditor's ability to comprehend these lessons of loss. Bishop draws to the heart of the matter and summons the ultimate parting gift, her mother's watch—an artifact that links the living and dead, recalling a time, expressing a generation—making tangible the feeling of irretrievable loss. Bishop literally lost her mother's time, as the stories "In the Village" and "Gwendolyn," and the poems "Sestina" and "Manners" all demonstrate. Looking beyond autobiography to the truth of this loss, however, Bishop exploits what is, after all, only one more "minor family relic."

The exemplum confounds conventional ideas of the subjective and objective, and demonstrates that loss is grave and universal, but too conventional to be deeply personal. She defers the threat of sentiment by the sweeping rhetorical gesture of "And look!" Her life, no longer a chaos of events, seems orderly and safe as Bishop inventories and schedules her losses: "my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses went." Her autobiography assumes an oddly reassuring linearity and predictability as the poem hurtles toward its closure. In spite of approximate knowledge—"my last, or next- to-last"—the end is palpable by its very proximity.

This registry of loss proceeds to the missing "three loved houses." Even that great modifier loved cannot convert these houses into homes. In spite of the wisdom of Bishop's crusade—"Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?" (see "Crusoe in England")—the expatriot narrating this poem remains homeless.

The narrator, further emboldened by self-knowledge, begins again with "I lost." The scale has tipped; forsaking the personal for "two cities, lovely ones" the poet supplies lineaments and character to these scenic vagaries. Like the child-artist of "Sestina," the speaker approaches the unspecified, the unembraceable, yet concrete, type of loss: "two rivers, a continent," the loss of which suggest the impermanence, the unpossessable nature of the earth itself.

Though there remains a tension between the public and private exempla, that tension is ill-defined and ill-conceived. Bishop has adhered to the standards and expectations of her aesthetic; she has captured knowledge within the language and form of the villanelle. Yet with the displaced utterance delivered sotto voce, Bishop conveys a struggle between growing self-knowledge and her poetic of reticence in this dialogue between the self and the lost. "Even" moors this hierarchy of loss to that always poorly articulated world of extremity—without you, I can't go on, I can't live without you—those contracted conditionals meant to express the inexpressible love between two people. What threatens to emerge is that very thing her rhetoric strives to cloak: the self, naked to the vagaries of language. This ultimate series of I-You dependencies is the final protest against human perishability. Herein lies the true lesson of loss: "—Even losing you." Turning from her common audience, Bishop allows the parenthetically ensnared qualities to create a caesura: "(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)." Readers participate in the auditory and visual recall of pleasure (not pain) reduced to this synecdoche for the severed other. The positive qualities of this ultimate sacrifice displace the irritations and categorizations that came before in the poem. The situation challenges not the pupils but the master herself. In the almost processional resignation of "I shan’t have lied. It's evident" rests the captive wisdom of the poem. In the extended refrain—

the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

—readers see that parenthetical cure for the only true disaster. This encapsulated lesson is for the master alone; unlike the free, gestural "And look!" designed to deflect attention from the self, the parenthetical injunction maps a course for only one. The poet knows that only knowledge, not wisdom, can be shared. Like the child in "Sestina," the adult must also make something of absence. Her reward is the knowledge with which to write. In this rare command—"(Write it!)"—Bishop distinguishes herself from even Stevens’s "Snow Man," who is "nothing himself," emerging as she does in this dramatic echo of William Carlos Williams’s "Say It!"

The formal constraints of the sestina and villanelle freed Bishop to work with personal material without inducing the maudlin self-despairing tone she despised. The most forbidding and private sorrows, monumentalized in art, oddly affirm human dignity, emotion, and care.

Though personal loss is often not explicitly confronted in Bishop's poems, it pervades them. Readers of Bishop frequently turn to "One Art" in Geography III as distinctively Bishopian in its restraint, formality, classicism. Yet this poem deals openly with loss and has been rightly called by J. D. McClatchy "painfully autobiographical." The formal demands of the villanelle keep "squads of undisciplined emotion" from overwhelming the poem, while James Merrill has spoken of "One Art" as resuscitating the villanelle in that its "key lines seem merely to approximate themselves, and the form, awakened by a kiss, simply toddles off to a new stage in its life, under the proud eye of Mother, or the Muse." Personal expression makes the form looser, more pliant and intimate. In fact, Bishop uses form frequently, and especially here, to show its arbitrariness, its attractive flimsiness. Bishop claims that she had not been able to write a villanelle before but that "One Art," possessing a somewhat diaristic dating through its metrics and tone, "was like writing a letter." It is a form tellingly imitative of the obsessional behavior of mourners with their need for repetition and ritual as resistance to "moving on" and their inevitable search for substitutions.

We are ultimately left not with control but with the unresolved tension between mastery and a world that refuses to be mastered; we are left with language. Restraint is tense hilarity here:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The imperative self-prompt "(Write it!)" conveys the immense energy needed to utter the last word of "disaster." From the beginning, Bishop presents "the art of losing" as perverse rejection of the desire to win. In the poem's alternating rhyme of "master" with "disaster," disaster has the last word. "The art of losing isn't hard to master" is true because losing is all we do. The poem reveals a struggle for mastery that will never be gained. We can only make loss into therapeutic play. One does try to master loss, but Bishop recommends that we recognize our powerlessness and play with the conditions of loss: the blurring and splitting of presence and absence, being and nonbeing.

Bishop's "art of losing" resembles what Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle calls the rule of "fort-da" (gone / there), after a game his grandson constructed in his mother's absence:

The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering the expressive "o-o-o-o." He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful "da" ("there"). This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return.

At first perplexed by an impulse seemingly opposed to the pleasure principle, by a symbolic repetition of the distressing experience of the mother's departure, Freud offers two explanations for the child's apparent gratification in this loss game.

At the outset he was in a passive situation--he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery acting independently of whether the (repeated) memory were in itself pleasurable or not. But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that it was "gone" might satisfy an impulse of the child's, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: "All right, then, go away! I don't need you. I'm sending you away myself." (10)

Freud finally hands over to a "system of aesthetics" (17) the consideration of how pleasure can come from repeating traumatic moments of dissatisfaction. The child's rendering of loss in symbolic terms with the accompanying verbalization "fort-da" suggests that loss marks entry into language, as language marks entry into the awareness of the presence of absence. The shifting between such appearance and disappearance. as we have seen, becomes quite vivid through abruptly sequential sentences of "In the Village":

First, she had come home. with her child. Then she had gone away again, alone, and left the child. Then she had come home. Then she had gone away again, with her sister; and now she was home again.

In a sense, Bishop practices the "instinctual renunciation" Freud points to in her poem not only by making loss an intention and active practice (as she does by swallowing the coins and burying the needles in the story) but by losing and recuperating words in rhyme. Poetry can imitate through refrain the experience of "fort-da."

The poet's "one art" handles plural loss; but the expansion of this phrase to include so much validates such activity as the one and only one possible—with death as the ultimate project to be undertaken even as it is postponed within language. The middle line endings weave together to spell ultimate "evident" loss—"intent" / "spent," "meant" / "went": the other side of will and choice must always be loss of control, abandon, renunciation. Bishop instructs us: "Lose something every day," and in the third stanza, "Then practice losing farther, losing faster." The tercets logically build up from small (keys) to big (continent) with demonic precision and momentum. We are reassured by the second stanza that mastery will come to the novice in time, that we will develop the ability to "[a]ccept the fluster." Yet the items lost become increasingly personal with her "mother's watch" at the center, deliberately at the beginning of a line as if to skip over it with a distracting exclamation, one that further heightens the way the poem presents a consciousness in process:

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Still a potentially "last" or "yet-to-be-dismantled" house remains for us to see slip away from the poet, but there will always, one senses, be a further house, the never-to-be-secure home of her childhood that must be continually refigured, the child of "Sestina" drawing yet "another inscrutable house." As we move forward, we also step backwards. The watch stands in for her mother's absence and loss—a timekeeper that reflects its inability to "keep" time. Embedded in the loss of the watch is also the loss of her mother's caretaking and vigilance, as well as her father's position as timekeeper.

In the penultimate stanza, she leaps from the moment of initial loss:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

She can afford to let go of these "realms" because her imagination can provide new ones. She travels from one tercet to the next, pushing the poem in opposing directions with rhyme. Crisis occurs just when we might expect "mastery." Even within lines there emerges the desire for mastery along with its inevitable breakdown. Enjambed lines in all stanzas but the next to last indicate slippage. A complete sentence occupies only part of a line in stanzas 2, 4, and 5 and so disintegrates any effect of finality or surety. Movement in time—"losing farther, losing faster"—is loss, and Bishop reinforces her theme of displacement with "farther" liminally haunted by "father."

Bishop's characteristic dash emphasizes breakage and propels us forward into the last enjambed four lines:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Loss and love are significantly enjambed with the first two lines of this final stanza, but they not only confess how loss and love are bound, but give continuing evidence of "I love)," risked with a solitary parenthesis in the line. The most intimate words are not deemphasized by being parenthesized but blaze out as a temporary withholding, as her most prominent resistance to and acceptance of losing. We no longer have an object such as the timepiece standing ill for a person but an evanescent voice and gesture, silhouette and trace. There appears a breakdown also in the certainty of the declaration "The art of losing isn’t hard to master" by the addition of "not too hard" and an admission of strain with the fiercely whispered "(Write it!)" between the stuttered double "like." Her "write it" is another way of saying "don't lose it. " But disaster exceeds troping. Writing reveals a doubleness: Bishop wants language to gain mastery, but writing brings us back to the recognition of displacement and loss. Rhyming, dashing, parenthesizing, joking—all these are activities meant to contain but in emphatic practice remind only how such strategies finally fail. They can lead to renunciation not by making "disaster" into reified form but by accepting it as process and reenactment.

The "work of mourning," explains Freud, involves a gradual withdrawal of investment from a loved and lost object but against such a necessity "a struggle of course arises—as maybe universally observed that man never willingly abandons a libido position, not even when a substitute is already beckoning to him." Bishop's art is one that gives up fixed positions. We can now understand, perhaps, how "One Art" is only seemingly far removed from The Diary or "In the Village": these texts demonstrate as well, as we have seen, Bishop's concern with absence as it participates in writing. Language insists upon presence but always keeps loss in sight through its movement; ultimately it cannot hold back the fluid self and reminds us of the space left between us and our words.

Elaborating upon Freud's "fort-da," which brings language and loss together, Jacques Lacan asserts that the experience of primal loss and the emergence of identity coincide in language. An originary unrelocatable moment, removing us from a state of undifferentiated wholeness with our mothers, commits us to continuous desire and translates us into the symbolic order of language and law. We become bound up in the paradoxical condition that "is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting"; our "demand for love," the articulation of it, then, puts us forever out of love's reach. Coming to see and say ourselves outside of the maternal body, we call ourselves others and feel the loss that this entails.

Since our identity, our assertion of "I," can only be constituted through language, according to Lacan, we see ourselves as whole or unified subjectivities only through the "function of meconnaissance" most notable in the mirror stage when the child sees its fragmented drives and motor impulses duplicated as a whole-but a whole that rests on the split or chasm necessitated by mirroring; the "meconnaissance" occurs as "form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction" and offers a gestalt, or "an exteriority in which this form . . . is certainly more constituent than constituted" and that "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination." Language, thus, aids us in believing the false vision of wholeness even as it shows such a vision to be an oversight. Consciousness attempts to veil over the power of the signifier over the signified, "the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier" that represents the operation of the unconscious. Poems that reflect such ontological uneasiness will appear from Bishop's first volume on, with its "Gentleman of Shalott" presenting a character divided by a shifting, unstable mirror, living within the breach "of constant re-adjustment, " within perpetual yet "exhilarating" uncertainty and halfness (CP, 9). Such a poem almost literalizes the Lacanian fracturing of the self.

Lacan, as does Bishop, always points us back to our language. Dreams rely upon the functions in language of metonymy and metaphor, covered over in waking consciousness to conceal fissure. Both metaphor and metonymy reveal that we cannot escape an endless chain of signifiers. Metaphor corresponds to "condensation," the superimposition of one signifier upon another: "One word for another, that is the formula for metaphor"; metonymy, on the other hand, reflects "displacement," the continual "veering off of signification," the "eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else" ("Agency," 156), much like the tireless and timely parataxis another early poem "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" discovers in its own text and the childhood book it describes with "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and"' (58).

According to Lacan's psycholinguistic model, we are constituted by a language that deconstitutes us, where "no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification" (150): subjectivity is always then, at risk, so precarious that it becomes appropriate to say: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (166). The entry into the symbolic through the Oedipal event inaugurates a gendered subject while the desire for wholeness exists in excess of possible satisfaction: this desire for completion will be thwarted by the subject's fragmentation within language. The phallus comes to stand for that moment of rupture from the imaginary dyadic relation with the mother, where one does not feel desire for the Other, because the Other is yet the self, or not other, without limit or demarcation. Lacan's definition of demand is relevant in showing the gap that persists between the subject's need and demand; this gap constitutes desire, so that "[d]emand constitutes the Other as already possessing the privilege of satisfying needs, that is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied"; this explains the "unconditional element of the demand," which must look beyond itself to some fictive "'absolute' condition," and it is from such an absence, "the residue of an obliteration" that "the power of pure loss emerges," which cannot, in any last analysis, be singularized or pinpointed ("Signification," 287).

Such an understanding of language and identity as grounded in loss is central to Bishop's feminist attempt to undo fixed or unitary identity. Jacqueline Rose's introduction to Lacan's essays makes clear his acknowledgment that the phallus is made only to figure by anatomy and signals its own "pretence to meaning," and the impossibility of satisfying desire; sexual identity is only "enjoined" upon the individual through entrance into language. Because of the arbitrary element in gender division, Rose sees implicit in Lacan's argument the possibility that "anyone can cross over and inscribe themselves on the opposite side from that which they are anatomically destined" (49). Lacan's project, in this light, encourages boundary transgression, especially if we consider his belief that analysis should not allow an individual to mask over the precariousness of her or his identity.

In the Lacanian economy, woman becomes, however, "other. "As Rose exposes, the phallus is by no means unproblematically privileged, for it is: "from the Other that the phallus seeks authority and is refused," but even as woman is subversive Other, Rose does not think females have "access to a different strata of language" (as does Yaeger, for example, in her discussion of "In the Village"): there is no escape from the Law of the Father (55). However, as Lacan does not differentiate enough the breakage of mother-child dyad in terms of the child's gender, he misses the distinct relationship that persists between mother and daughter. The female may indeed, come to the symbolic via an alternate route—her language a different relation to loss. For the girl child, the ruptured primordial relationship may appear less final, and her gender role less reified than the boy's in his identification with his father, as Chodorow has described. Rose objects to Chodorow's apparent assumption of a unified identity (37), yet Chodorow acknowledges gender position as social construction that makes intrasubjective shifting more available to women; in his emphasis on lack and loss, Lacan does not acknowledge relation (as do both Chodorow and Bishop), primarily because his androcentric perspective posits woman as the eternal Other.

If language is joined inseparably with the recognition of loss, females come to that language doubly exiled from the dominant sign system. Nevertheless, identification with the mother makes for a potentially more pluralistic and multiple self. Julia Kristeva, for instance, rereads Lacan and posits a "questionable subject in process" that exists through the fluctuation between the poles of the semiotic (associated with the unconscious, the maternal, the disruptive) and the symbolic (responsible for the rational, the paternal, the systematic). She considers such movement "poetic language," which through its "signifying operations, is an unsettling process—when not an outright destruction—of the identity of meaning and the speaking subject," and links the feminine with poetry, or more precisely, with the disruption it produces. While she does not explicitly catalogue her writing as feminist or, for the most part, treat women writers, Kristeva tellingly concedes: "It is probably necessary to be a woman . . . not to renounce theoretical reason but to compel it to increase its power by giving it an object beyond its limits" (146).

Bishop's poems subvert the very forms—not in themselves radical or "avant-garde"—they employ. "One Art," specifically, casts itself either forward or backward: testing the limits of rational control, revealing the subject unsettled within flux; it literalizes displacement through its calling up of and discarding of objects. While "One Art" appears almost hyperrational, it remains consistent with Bishop's earlier more explicit surrealism—the Paris poems "Sleeping on the Ceiling," "Sleeping Standing Up," and "Paris, A.M.," to name the most striking—which openly affronts reason and logic, manipulating dream symbols in incongruously neat stanzas, to disorient and to trouble. We come upon form, yet cannot locate or settle into a "subject." Bishop wrote at least seventeen drafts of "One Art" before she considered it written. Not surprisingly, the act of writing is a focal concern of the poem, as becoming an artist is in the story "In the Village." Earlier drafts of the poem show her struggling with the crucial final stanza where phrases such as "Say it," "Oh, go on, write it!" recur as she tries to allow herself to articulate "disaster." Draft 2 even has the tentative entitlement: "(Why not just write 'disaster'?)," protected within a parenthesis. The stilted archaism of "shan't" reveals the essential feebleness involved in the final version's assertion "I shan't have lied." In some of the telling drafts, she simply admits "all that I write is false. I'm writing lies now. It's quite evident"—with false crossed off. Writing may tempt us into lies, but it also shows us up. It is only in the process of "writing it" that Bishop can face the catastrophic losing of a love, though the drafts do not foresee surviving such an event: the first one trails off with the impossible maxim, "He who loseth his life, etc.—but he who / loses his love—never, no never never never never again—" (draft 1).

As Lorrie Goldensohn acutely reminds us in her study on Bishop, written with biography as guide to the poetry, we cannot read the poems in Geography III, and especially "One Art," underestimating the impact Lota's death had upon Bishop or without appreciating the topographical loss Bishop felt in repatriating to the States from Brazil: loss of person, home, family, country can hardly be disengaged (126). The seventeen drafts Bishop wrote present a series of "mislayings," a word Bishop uses in her first version, and the published poem continues to confess its inevitable lying. "I really / want to introduce myself," says draft 1: identity is predicated upon mislaying, so that like the more lavishly described loved one who disappears into a flickering "you," the "I" completely goes under. The "you" is at first an "average-sized" "dazzlingly intelligent person" with blue eyes that "were exceptionally beautiful" (draft 1), and does not, by the way, seem necessarily identifiable with Lota, but with all those whom she has lost or could lose. What becomes "eyes of the small wild aster" in draft 2 evaporates in the remaining trials. "One Art," with all its drafts, represents an archaeology of the struggle with losing. a process that is always with us, so that every loss comes to be all losses, retrogressive and prospective, shuttling through villanelle. As a love poem, "One Art," as Goldensohn points out, does not necessarily signpost a same-sex relationship. Yet it must; for we know what we know. It is stitched together through a lineage of female loss, with the mother's watch in the centrifugal position, with all other love relationships with women timed by it.

Throughout her work, Bishop will test and question the boundaries imposed by "theoretical reason" with the awareness that we must resort to them; if we continue to use Kristeva's model, language and sense emerge only in the spaces created through severance from the semiotic. Retrieval through rhyme in "One Art" again serves as a way of pointing up the passage of language from the semiotic through the symbolic; form becomes a net through, which identity and all its belongings slip. In spite of Bishop's reliance on form, her poem disturbs through its attention to arbitrary and frangible boundaries. Ultimately, Bishop practices forfeiture, a recognition of human limits and imperfection, and therefore, also a potentially freeing activity. When Adrienne Rich writes "It's true, these last few years I've lived / watching myself in the act of loss," she pointedly addresses Bishop's "One Art." Instead of sanctifying art, Rich insists upon imperfection, and says that "the art of losing" is "for [her] no art / only badly-done exercises." Rich's poem insists on the primacy of loss and refuses to accept "acts of parting." She concludes inconclusively:

trying to let go
without giving up yes Elizabeth
a village there a sister, comrade, cat
and more no art to this but anger

Celebrating attachment to earthly things. Rich calls for a vitriolic response, not the pained submission that might be read in Bishop. Yet Rich's poem presents itself as both homage and umbrage in mirroring what "One Art" un- says by its terminal "disaster." Bishop does indeed feel her "heart forced to question its presumption in this world" (Rich, "Contradiction," Your Native Land, 98) because she does not see any reason to presume. Still "One Art" admits that—tied to the villanelle in a ritual exercise and exorcism of loss—she cannot but be caught up in desire and attachment. Bishop's poem suggests that she would like to write off artfully what she realizes always eludes inscription—those spaces marking the losses of a "questionable subject"; the form of poems becomes, again and again, expressive of the unruly processes of consciousness they denote.

[Colwell is examining the various drafts of "One Art," and focuses here on Bishop’s struggle to write the last stanza.]

… [B]y embodying uncontrollable emotion in a form meant to control it, and in an utterance meant to deny it, Bishop can create tension, ambivalence, and a poignant recognition of the pathos of human attempts to control the uncontrollable.

In the earlier drafts of this stanza, Bishop struggled with the desire to say and unsay, to say two things at once, both admitting to the truth of the argument that the villanelle has established and admitting to the evasion of the truth that the tone has insisted on. To accomplish this she tried lines such as "of course, I’m lying" and "it’s evident I’m telling the truth"; one draft of one verse completely explodes the villanelle form:

All that I write is false, it’s evident
The art of losing isn’t hard to master
oh no
anything at all anything but one’s love. (Say it: disaster).

This duality that Bishop works so hard to achieve in draft after draft (there are seventeen drafts of "One Art" in vassar’s manuscript collection) she finally finds in one word, "shan’t." This word, with its overformal stiffness, its anachronistic sound, its school-marmish precision, says both "I’m lying" and "I’m not lying." Using the future perfect tense allows an ambiguity that no other grammatical structure can provide. Bishop accomplished the feat of expressing her ambivalence about her own endeavor; in the word "shan’t" she combined opposite meanings in one utterance.

From Anne Colwell, "Geography III: The Art of Losing," Chapter 4 in Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 178

… The loss of love here is not over and thereby mastered, but threatened: a possibility brooded upon, or an act being endured. How Bishop dramatizes the threatened loss is uncanny. "I shan’t have lied," she claims. Under such intense emotional pressure she shifts to the decorous "shan’t," as if the better to distance and control her response to this loss, the newest and last. And again, my mind’s ear often substitutes "died" for "lied." In self-defense, lying makes a moral issue out of the heart’s existential dilemma; a way of speaking is a habit of being. The real moral force of her stanza comes – and this is true in many other Bishop poems – from her adverbs:even losing you; not too hard to master. These shades of emphasis are so carefully composed, so lightly sketched in, that their true dramatic power is missed by some readers.

And then that theatrical last line – how severely, how knowingly and helplessly qualified! It reminds me of that extraordinary line in "At the Fishhouses," at three removes from itself: "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be." The line her begins with a qualification ("though"), goes on to a suggestion rather than the assertion we might expect of a last line ("it may look"), then to a comparison that’s doubled, stuttering ("like … like"), interrupted by a parenthetical injunction that is at once confession and compulsion, so that when "disaster" finally comes it sounds with a shocking finality.

The whole stanza is in danger of breaking apart, and breaking down. In this last line the poet’s voice literally cracks. The villanelle – that strictest and most intractable of verse forms – can barely control the grief, yet helps the poet keep her balance. …

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